As Good as a Comedy and Paddy McGann are two short novels that
reveal Simms’s talents as a comedic writer. While other works, like Border
Beagles, contain humorous sections or characters, these two works stand out
as sustained comedic successes. In these, Simms shows an understanding of
and skill at utilizing the tropes of frontier humor, popularized by the likes
of A.B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, as well as a use of humor as
social commentary that foreshadowed the work of Twain. While each was
published previously, they were published together in one volume in 1972, ...

Set in September of 1780, Katharine Walton is
the third installment of a trilogy that follows The Partisan and Mellichampein
covering the Revolution in South Carolina.[1] While The Partisan and Mellichampe are
set in the interior of the Santee and Wateree rivers, Katharine Walton takes
the reader to the city of Charleston in 1780-81 to trace the social world of
South Carolina under British occupation.[2] The city functions narratively as a
“unifying center,” according to John C. Guilds, to free Katharine
Walton of the “awkward shifts in action and setting ...

Richard Hurdis, the second of Simms’s
Border Romances (following Guy Rivers
of 1834), presents an intriguing study of the author’s development, as its
publication history illustrated Simms’s notorious sensitivity to critical
reception. Hurdis came out during a worrisome time in Simms’s life, with his
second wife, Chevillette Eliza Roach Simms, severely ill while pregnant, and
the writer’s relationship with his publisher, the Harper Brothers of New York,
souring. John C. Guilds notes that
“alternating moods of depression and optimism—lifelong traits—soon became
dominant ...

While one of the more obscure
works in Simms’s canon, The Prima
Donna: A Passage from City Life, provides
an intriguing look into his relationship with the serial publishers who
published so much of his work. It is
also a noteworthy work for its content. Biographer
John C. Guilds finds that it reflects
Simms’s “interest in theater” and helps to demonstrate that the author “wrote
more effectively about drama than he
wrote drama itself.”[1]
A brief, 24-page fiction published as a standalone book by Louis A. Godey in
1844, The Prima Donna was originally
composed sometime ...